THE VAN APFEL GIRLS ARE GONE

A journalist makes her fiction debut with a tale of missing girls as told by one girl who never stopped missing them.

So many girls disappear. This is true in life. It’s maybe even truer in fiction. Girls who go missing are an endless source of fascination. Or maybe this is just when the girls are white and, at the very least, middle-class. These girls are especially compelling when they’re beautiful. Cordelia Van Apfel was white, middle-class, and beautiful before she and her sisters vanished from an Australian suburb in 1992, and she is the absence at the heart of McLean’s debut novel. Tikka Malloy is heading home from America because her sister, Laura, is battling cancer. Tikka’s return doesn’t revive her search for the beguiling Cordie—she has never stopped searching for Cordie; she sees Cordie everywhere—but Tikka’s presence brings long-buried secrets back to the surface of the insular community in which she and her sister became friends with the Van Apfel girls before they disappeared. Tikka has a sharp sense of self-awareness. She recognizes that her place in the hierarchy of neighborhood girls—not quite included by the older girls, eager to separate herself from the younger—and the trauma of losing her friends have left her stunted as an adult. But all of this makes Tikka a terrific narrator. She examines her memories with the perspective of a grown-up, and she finds that people who were reticent to tell her everything when the Van Apfel girls went missing are eager to unburden themselves now. Tikka’s conversations with her father are especially affecting, and of course the local busybody and Tupperware saleswoman has a great deal of information and insight to share. There are, ultimately, no real surprises. What happened to Cordie is something that happens to any number of girls. It’s the disappearance of her sisters with her that made her story sensational. But Cordie isn’t like other girls for Tikka, which makes her special for the reader, too.

A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel.